Teaching Articles

My daughter recently sent me a great question and I thought there might be a few of you out there who have asked the same thing at one time or another. She asked, “Why did God use Moses at the Red Sea when He could have just made the waters open and close by His hand instead of man’s?” Here’s my shot at an answer...

Shavuot is one of the only holidays that we are not really told why we are to celebrate it. It is a feast for sure in every sense of the word. It's a great celebration that initiates the wheat harvest and concludes the Spring feasts of the LORD that started on Nisan 14 with Pesach. We are told in the Torah to count seven Sabbaths from Passover and to mark the fiftieth day as a holy convocation unto Him. But what does all this mean and what does it mean for us today? What was the significance of it in biblical times and more importantly, does it have any power for us today?

I know I say this a lot, but this week's Torah portion is one of my favorites to talk about. This is the portion that's all about something new. Adam lost the priesthood when he sinned in the Garden of Eden. Since then, every historical event of the Bible led up to the inaugural moment found in this Torah portion. During it, the priesthood would be reestablished. The first part of the portion is the drum-roll moment where "Adam" begins the process of coming back to life. And not only does scripture detail opening day at the Levitical "ball park" for us, it also holds the pattern for our own inaugural moments where we, too, can experience the glory of God. Let's dive in.

This week's portion is called Shemini, which means "eighth." It comes from the opening part of this parsha where it talks about the priests being inaugurated on the eighth day. And although there is much to be said about that and how it's connected to us being inaugurated as priests on the prophetic eighth day after the seventh millennium, today I'm going to focus on a different part of the section: the profane fire of Nadab and Abihu in Leviticus chapter 10.

I spent a considerable amount of time in the first two parts of this series refuting the claim that there is such a thing as the Book of the Law (BOL) and the Book of the Covenant (BOC). Those who believe this claim say that the BOC and the BOL are two entirely different books and that the BOL was only given to the Israelites because of the sin of the golden calf. In part 1 I demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that the two terms are synonymous throughout the Bible and are used interchangeably by both Moses and even Joshua. In part 2 I also unpacked the timeline of the golden calf event and showed how the incident happened exactly the way Exodus portrays it at the end of the first forty-day trip that Moses took up Sinai. This is significant because if the golden calf incident did, in fact, happen at the end of the trip then this entire theory is proven false. This would mean its teachers could no longer claim that the BOL was given because of the sin of the golden calf because God gives commandments from chapter 25 all the way up to the golden calf incident, commandments these teachers say are part of the BOL. Their only response to the clear biblical timeline is to say that the event didn't happen in chronological order as the text suggests. This bold and undocumented manipulation is the main pillar holding up this false doctrine.